Actual benefits of amd64 over i386

[Michael Hopkins]

Hi all

I have been suffering quite a bit of frustration recently with many ports
that I need being 'i386 only' and no straightforward fixes.  Maybe amd64
could be described as 'tier 1.5'  ;o)

Can I ask for honest opinions here on what speed (or other?) benefits I
should get by running amd64 over i386?  I will never be using more than
about 1 G of memory on this particular machine so memory limit is not an
issue.  Maybe I should just rebuild the machine as i386?

It's an Athlon64 3400+ on a Gigabyte motherboard - used mainly for
cross-compiling to Linux and mingw32, NFS file sharing, some X11 over the
network with my local Mac OS X machine as X server and using my own C/C++
maths code (which must run as fast as possible).

TIA

Michael


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